Awesome feedback! Thank you so much for taking the time to share this much detail with us, it means a lot
This is the first time we have ever made a dungeon crawler, and you are the second person to mention the tile size issue! Definitely a big takeaway for us if we ever decide to participate in a DC jam in the future. I think this went wrong in two ways, first, we sort of lined up our assets by sight instead of sizing them appropriately, we were too deep in by the time we realized that was a problem. Second, we wanted the enemies to be bigger, so we just took the lazy way out and scaled them up without modifying animations, guaranteed to make everything feel a bit funny, lol.
The transitions were my fault! Unreal is a bit greedy for resources, and in order to keep each "level" manageable, we had to split everything into a bunch of sections. My original plan for us to deal with this was to just copy over the entire next room so you could see it before you walked into the transition. However, that was more complicated than anticipated and also ate up a ton of resources, which is what we were trying to avoid in the first place. So, we ended up with the weird situation where you walk through "airlocks" or hallways to transition, definitely not ideal!
Haha, so far as the gym and showers, this was supposed to be the crew section of a military-style ship that was invaded and slightly damaged, so we had imagined that those types of facilities would fit in well. It almost ended up feeling like we were taking a tour through the bathhouse/gym in a Yakuza game instead, though. But I think a little more backstory in the game would have fleshed that out; cutscenes and "datapads" or in-game lore are two things we did not make it to on your proposed feature list.
It wasn't so much an oversight for the icons, but it was a sacrifice for time! We had been polishing everything too much and ended up in a mad crunch on the last weekend, so we just snapped pictures of the items in the engine and turned them into textures for the icons, lol.
The blue bar was a relic left over from another abandoned feature. We had planned abilities, but they didn't make it, so we forgot to take that out. In terms of the game being easy, that was very intentional, as I had said in another post below. Better than anyone can make it through the game and get the whole experience of what we made than make it challenging. You can take hits, the HP bar does work, and you can die, though; however, that is our major bug; if you die, the dungeon state machine doesn't reset, so you have to start the whole game over again. :(
There was no time to get into secret rooms, but there were several chests and the squeaky toys you could find. The only puzzle was figuring out what the keys were used for by matching the color with the doors. Too much time was spent on polish and not enough on fundamental gameplay; I think that is another good lesson for us to take, and we will block out our time differently on the next one!
Thanks again for all the feedback, and thanks for playing!